Stanford's Self Driving Car Tops 120mph On Racetrack

kkleiner writes with this snippet: "Just as Google's self-driving Prius goes for distance, recently passing 300,000 miles, Stanford's self-driving Audi TTS instead has the need for speed. The Audi, known as Shelley, sped around the Thunderhill Raceway track north of Sacramento topping 120 miles per hour on straightaways. The less than two and a half minutes it took to complete the 3-mile course is comparable to times achieved by professional drivers." Now if only Montana could take a cue from Nevada's rules for self-driving cars, and bring back "reasonable and prudent" speed regulation, driving out west could get a lot more exciting.

Reasonable and prudent

[longhunt]

I grew up in Montana under the "reasonable and prudent" speed limit. Man, I miss those days. The problem was that too many tourists came in that didn't know the roads and got themselves killed, so the feds threatened to yank our highway money unless we changed the law. Unless you can do away with either the Federal government or idiot tourists, it's probably not coming back.

not that impressive

[SuperBanana]

Sigh, I've been reading a lot of stories now about Stanford tooting their horn about this...and they just can't seem to stop blabbing about how they're "as good as a human driver". Bullshit.

I have quite a bit of HPDE [wikipedia.org] experience.

First off, quoting times around the track is silly unless it was in the same car. Which it wasn't. However, if you want to see what "fast" is, look at the SCCA records [sfrscca.org] for various classes. Spoiler: lap times of 1:39 to 2:12. Read that again: the absolute slowest competitive race time is 2:12, and that was done by someone in a Mazda Miata in a stock racing class (ie, limited modifications.) The Stanford car has more than 100HP over the Miata, all wheel drive, big brakes, and a dual-clutch gearbox that shifts virtually instantly.

120MPH sounds impressive, until you realize that we're talking about a nearly 270HP car and a very open track. [thunderhill.com] 120MPH isn't that hard to hit on many racetracks, even for a novice, and it's not a demonstration of skill; what's a demonstration of skill is how fast you exit each turn. Just by looking, I can tell you the fastest part of the track is between turn 8 and 9, most likely, for high-powered cars; slower, lighter cars may be faster between 9 and 10.

Second: "professional driver" could mean anything from someone who drives a taxi, to someone who races dirt-track, to someone who races Formula 1. Anyone can call themselves a "professional driver."

Third: the way that thing drives itself is absolutely atrocious and reminiscent of the worst kind of first-day HPDE students. The ones who think they know how to drive, don't, and are aggressive. Hammers it down the straights, not smooth with the controls at all, misses the apex (the inside center of the turn) by half a dozen feet, overloads the tires (hear them screaming? That's not a "I'm giving you the most grip" noise, that's a "I'm past my limit and am sliding all over the place" noise)...ugh.

From the way the car dives and rolls, as well as how the 'driver' is thrown around and the steering wheel is jerked - there is absolutely no finesse, and that is critical for driving fast.

Lastly: "For example, the math involved in getting a spinning wheel to grip the pavement is very similar to recovering from a slide on a patch of ice. "If we can figure out how to get Shelley out of trouble on a race track, we can get out of trouble on ice," Gerdes said."

Haha, no. Pavement, ice, dirt, and snow all have very different characteristics and "getting out of trouble" on them is different. Effin' Californians... Spend a winter in Vermont, then tell me about how to drive on ice.

Re:Reasonable and prudent

[BigT]

That was in '98. OP is talking about in the 70's when all states were required by the feds to have a 55 MPH speed limit or lose highway funding.

In '97-'98 there were way too many idiots on the roads thinking 120 mph was reasonable and prudent. Even on the twisty 2 lane roads.

Re:More exciting?

[cduffy]

I don't know the statistics for motor vehicles, but for bicycles, the common accidents are motorist-at-fault but avoidable by following best practices on the part of the cyclist (typically right-hook and left-hook, avoidable by things like proper lane positioning -- taking the lane rather than trying to ride in the gutter to avoid encouraging motorists to pass unsafely, using positioning to encourage drivers making right turns at an intersection to go behind rather than in front of you, etc) or cyclist-at-fault and thus avoidable (riding at night without lights, riding on the wrong side of the street, running intersections), and only a very tiny percentage are motorist-at-fault and unavoidable (ie. the "struck from behind while riding safely and properly" accident that everyone worries so much about... has a high chance of being lethal should it happen, but frequency is almost negligible).

That said -- I'm curious as to whether the parent's asserted statistics more correctly refer to the party at fault in lethal accidents as opposed to the parties harmed in accidents. My suspicion would be very much the former.